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Water Oxidation Using Iridium Catalysts

Producing fuel from water using solar power is a viable strategy for a carbon-neutral energy solution. A major obstacle to this strategy is finding robust and active transition metal catalysts that can undergo the 4e/4H+ steps to oxidize water and produce dioxygen. A highly active and robust Ir catalyst is reported. DFT studies that compliment the experimental data show that the formation of the O-O bond does not require radical oxyl species and is favored by the presence of a π*(Ir=O) orbital with oxygen contribution in the LUMO level.